In information technology (IT) management, enterprises are moving from physical servers toward virtualization, virtual machines (VMs) and cloud computing, for example, mainly because a virtual environment provides reduced cost through better resource utilization, standardization and simplified maintenance. The concept of virtual machines and cloud computing allows an enterprise to run its IT without actually having to own the physical infrastructure associated with computing systems. Instead, a provider (referred to herein as a service provider) provides the physical computing infrastructure and enables the enterprise to run its IT applications utilizing the service provider's physical computing infrastructure typically over a network such as the Internet, for example, for the duration that the enterprise needs to run such IT applications. In another aspect of could computing, a provider may provide software and/or one or more services on one or more virtual machines to a customer.
In cloud environments, virtual machines or the like virtual servers have transient lifetimes. A user can destroy VMs at will and without notice. However, there may be pending actions on these VMs either through specific customer requests or automated event actions raised by an associated cloud monitoring system. For example, in strategic outsourcing (SO) and cloud environment, problem tickets are opened for events causing problems, to be resolved by system administrators. Opening, handling and closing of each such problem ticket costs time and effort. Hence, such pending actions cost the service provider money and time. In this disclosure, an approach is described to track down pending actions and auto-close them.